Dhruv Bhutani writes in XDA: 3 reasons I self-host everything but my own email server
And basically he is right – email is by far the hardest part of hosting, and that was also the #1 reason I went back from a virtual (read: part of) co-located server to “simple” webhosting (read: managed but small).
But – there’s more to it than meets the eye. First it has to be defined what “self hosting” means. If that’s only your personal website, your calendar and address book etc. then yes, you can do most of that with a small home server. You’d need DynDNS if you want to give that a name, and a real external DNS service if you want a real TLD (like mine here at lonien.de). I used to split that service, so I could move my virtual server anywhere I’d like to without losing my domain name and everything – I’d just have to point that to the new location.
But even at home, I wouldn’t trust a small NAS and connect that to the outside world, except maybe over some kind of VPN like Wireguard (which again means: goodbye world to most) – that’s how I now run my calendar and address book on a Raspberry Pi5 instead of using Google or any other of the big guys for that. No one except me needs access to my calendar and my address (and phone) book, so that’s okay.
And your web site? Well here it gets a little more complicated. Not as complicated as email, true, but there’s still a lot to consider, and also a lot of work to do if you want to host that at home. Plus even then it’s not entirely cost-free; running a server adds up to your electricity bill, and you also have to consider the time you invest to keep it safe and up and running. Plus the cost of learning; you yourself also have to keep up to date with technology.
There’s more. in case you need any kind of reliable hosting, you have to think about redundancy. No one cares if your blog is down for a few days, but if you also run the blogs or websites of friends and family, or even the ones of some interest groups or – $deity forbid – paid ones, then it gets a lot harder. How do you distribute services, and avoid single points of failure? Will you use Cloudflare and/or Akamai for fast world-wide access, or even both? And a few virtual servers at AWS or Google or whatever other cloud you might rely upon?
Hosting ain’t easy, and this opinion comes from a former IT pro. Read this report about running an encrypted matrix server for a relatively small project like Gadgetbridge in case you’re interest. So even if you use public and free services like matrix.org, or wordpress.com or blogspot.com, you still have to think about others in the first place, and before you even start. And the same is true for the so-called Fediverse. Remember, that are other peoples’ resources, even and especially if you don’t pay for them for now.
No – hosting is anything but easy, and if you care for content more than for the technical stuff and the doing (and maybe being smug or proud that you can do it), then you should probably leave hosting to the pros.
And for mail anyway. I’d rather give 1€/month to mailbox.org (or any other trusted 3rd party) than to ever trying to do that myself again. Or take the big and free ones for that if you don’t care about privacy that much.
As always, thanks for reading.
